Sometimes, even more than wanting to be a film’s beautiful heroine or superhero protagonist, viewers are swept away by a desire to inhabit the mansions, castles, swanky bachelor pads, or sci-fi landscapes they see on the big screen. Such architecturally minded film buffs will drool over Archicine, a new series of illustrations by Barcelona-based artist and architect Federico Babina, depicting iconic buildings and landscapes from classic films.

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“I have always been fascinated by the relationship between architecture and cinema,” Babina tells Co.Design. “All people consciously or unconsciously connect a movie with the space in which the action takes place. It’s like a box that contains a gift. The idea of the series of illustrations was to transform the ‘box’ into the ‘gift.'”

There’s Uncle Owen’s moisture farm on Tatooine from Star Wars; the red lighthouse from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom; George’s modernist pad from A Single Man; the Greenwich Village apartment complex from Rear Window; and the futuristic suburban home where the superhero family of The Incredibles pretended to be normal. Babina’s graphic style recalls vintage movie posters and offers a fresh interpretation of the places where our favorite characters lived (or farmed moisture, or mourned the death of a lover while being sculpted like a Greek god, or witnessed murders).

The scenographies in film are imagined, realized, and built as story-telling devices. Architecture helps develop characters: The Big Lebowski‘s Jackie Treehorn wouldn’t be Jackie Treehorn without his Malibu bachelor pad, designed by John Lautner and filled with orange leather couches and trampolining naked women. “The architectural space in the film is not just a background but is transformed as an added protagonist,” Babina says. “Movies have the ability to transport us to different worlds and lives and let us live and breathe real or fantastic architecture.”

Babina is the imaginative illustrator-architect who brought us Archipixel, an animation of famous architects and their buildings rendered as pixellated cartoons. You can purchase gallery-quality Giclee prints of the illustrations in various sizes for $24.96 to $83.20 here.

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About the author

Carey Dunne is a Brooklyn-based writer covering art and design. Follow her on Twitter.